Dilan
I'm with Pooky Knightsmith who has a PhD in Child and Adolescent Mental Health. Pooky, how can parents and carers help build positive wellbeing in young children?
Pooky
The first thing they need to do is create a safe environment. So that's both physically and emotionally - enabling children to feel safe. So that's about consistency and predictability.
Dilan
How can parents get their kids to talk about their feelings?
Pooky
The best way is to talk about your feelings yourself and make this a normal part of conversation. When you start talking to children about different feelings, then you can help them to understand that all feelings are okay and valid. But some feelings maybe are a bit more difficult for us, so things like feeling angry or anxious, but we can teach kids that there is stuff that they can do to control some of those feelings and manage them a little bit. So we can teach them really simple stuff like the five finger breathing technique to help them to calm down.
So you put your hand out in front of you and you start with the finger from the other hand, and every time you run up a finger or thumb, then you breathe in, and then you pause at the top, you breathe out as you run down the other side. And you pause at the bottom. And you go all the way across your whole hand. And then when you get to the end, then you take a breath, you shake it out and you see how you feel now.
When you teach a child that there's something that they can do that can help them to control a little bit how they feel, it's a bit like giving them a superpower, because it can feel sometimes like their feelings are controlling them, and this helps them realise that they can control their feelings.
Dilan
I bet a lot of parents worry about not quite getting it right...
Pooky
Yeah. Every parent worries about that and it's important not to beat ourselves up too much if we don't get it right all the time. There's no such thing as a perfect parent.
Dilan
What is the one thing that parents and carers should remember if they have concerns about their child's mental health?
Pooky
The best thing that you can do as a parent or carer is to just stop and listen to your child. Children need to feel seen and heard, and with really young children, listening doesn't always look like this. Sometimes it'll be about listening to your child through play or through art or through music, but enable them to feel heard.
